My red pencil

The amazing thing is that the journey becomes a way of living, the art of living… I didn’t know what soul was at the beginning of the journey, into which I stumbled without realizing it through… a diet… A very fat woman in my late thirties, who had recently given birth and did not know how to take off the weight… another diet was in order… but what diet…

What is important of this story is that, without realizing it, a new journey began, one that would eventually also connect me with health issues I hadn’t addressed…

A very personal journey and dialogue

A first hint of dialogue with the body came through diet…

The second thing came, as I have just said, with health matters, that in time would make available two new aspects of body…

One was that I was responsible of my health and another, exercise. Exercise… not as a calories burning exercise but as the natural language of the body, the human animal we are who loves to play in movement, dancing, jumping, rolling, stumbling, the body from the perspective of the body, alive…

The third aspect of this language, that gives support and expression to this dialogue are emotions. Experience is there if emotions are there… Emotions are better understood as reactions to outer or inner situations…

Some emotions overtake us, and we explode angrily, insult, or cry and with a pounding heart feel lost, or we become irritated, in a bad mood, filling the air with poisonous gas or a terrible sense of doom…

And then there is stress… a dim feeling that we are not flowing towards or with the flow of life, we are stuck, either depressed, bored, annoyed, haunted, contracted, restricted…deaden…

The funny thing about emotions is that they are not always expressed… we have learned to control them, and now we are not impolite, but politically correct because we need to feel accepted, and coolly adjusted to any situation…

In many cases that we don’t even know we have had emotions, we have repressed them to the point that even ourselves are not aware of them… and then they are bound in the body, titanically, contracting muscles, hurting, pounding the vein because the heart is unable to do it …

And if emotion have been calling our attention for a long time and found nowhere to be heard, they are making us ill…

A ‘good’ thing about emotions is that they are bound to images…

And this the fourth element of the dialogue… images. What are images? where do we find them?

The natural source of images are dreams… and to understand, to the best of our possibilities, what our dreams are telling us, we must learn their language.

This is the language of myth and fairy tales, of symbols and alchemy, of Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious thought… Dreams are the unmediated language of the soul, its most pure language…

But I said that images have to do with emotions, and what I mean by that is that there are situations in life that organize themselves as our inner images, and trigger an emotional response in us… they form a body and soul bond… they are the pebbles along the path…

This inner search populated the psychic spaces of my body, not the body through the mirror of others, but the inner body: beauty, renewal and grace, belonging to yourself, being and becoming.

This is the dialogue and discovery that brought joy and pleasure to my life. It brought the ownership of my desire, emotion not as reaction but as connection with life, emotion as energy to be in the body. Giving me my voice, my own gait…emotion as energy to create the art of life…the grace of lived emotion, love and passion… that is now my Red Pencil.